The dark alleys on online shopping!

“Shop quickly or else you will miss the best price on the product.”  ”Only two units left.”
You must have seen such messages while shopping online. As soon as you like an item on a shopping website or app and keep it in the wishlist, you start getting notifications.  Buy or else discount ends. People are buying the same T-shirt that you liked, decide quickly or else the T-shirt will slip away from your hands. This method of pressuring customers for shopping is called Dark Pattern. These are online design tools that send messages to those who come to their website for buying goods. The purpose is to make you feel that if you don’t buy now, you will lose out on good deals.

You are also lured into more quantity than your requirement. As soon as you add a product to the shopping cart, you get notifications of special offers . One packet of biscuits for 12 rupees, two packets for 20 rupees and 4 packets for 35 rupees.. Luring you to buy 4 packets instead of 1 in the name of savings is also a dark pattern tactic.

Similarly, you face Dark patterns of Confirm Shaming when you book a hotel room online. As soon as you put your booking query on the travel aggregator site, one after another pop-up ads start coming – “At this time 25 other people are looking at this page.. Book the hotel room now and get a 15 percent discount.. Otherwise you will have to pay more.. Now only one room is left.. So hurry up..” These scare the user over and over again that your deal is about to get over. And in fear of losing it you make the mistake of booking in haste.

The government has already issued a warning about the tactics used by e-commerce companies to influence customer preferences. A task force of 17 members has been formed to prepare guidelines to stop dark patterns and protect consumers.

Delhi University Professor and Managing Editor of Consumer Voice, Shriram Khanna, says that dark patterns are a hidden strategy of e-commerce sites. Through this, they attract the consumers, mislead them, and make them shop even when they dont need it. The consumer doesn’t even know what’s happening behind the scenes. These screens of the sites are programmed in such a way that they take the consumer from one place to another.  This affects the consumer and they end up shopping. This is beneficial for e-commerce companies and harmful for consumers.

So, it is essential to know about these tricks. The Ministry of Consumer Affairs has identified some dark patterns such as – False urgency – Consumers are forced to shop by making a fool of them  that the goods might run out of stock. This is what happened with Shefali.
The second trick is Basket Sneaking – this means adding additional products or services without the customer’s consent. Subscription traps – this means easy to sign up for a service but difficult to come out of it and

Third one is Bait & Switch- you are shown an advertisement for a product, but you get delivery of something else, often lower quality products.

The names are different but purpose is the same – to mislead the consumer.

By 2030, India’s digital economy will be worth 1 trillion dollars. This means the number of online transactions and shopping you are doing now will increase many times over. And with this, these digital companies’ tactics of keeping consumers in the dark and making them spend money will also increase. The government will bring rules but the rules of the government can easily be bypassed.  So if you want to avoid this selling strategy of e-commerce companies, then, you better stay alert.